More than a dozen ridings blitzed by harassing fake Liberal phone calls in 2011 election

Targets of fraudulent and harassing calls

Photograph by: Dennis Leung
, The Ottawa Citizen

An analysis of reports of mysterious harassing phone calls during the May 2011 election points to the existence of a systematic voter suppression campaign targeting Liberal voters in tightly contested ridings.

Unlike the pre-recorded "robocalls" now under investigation by Elections Canada, these calls came from live callers, likely working from a call centre.

Many received calls in the middle of the night from callers claiming they represented the local Liberal candidate.

Jewish voters in two ridings complained of receiving repeated phone calls at meal time on the Saturday Sabbath. In another riding where the Liberal candidate was of Pakistani heritage, some said the callers mimicked a South Asian accent.

People who received the calls report that the callers would phone repeatedly, irritating the recipients, and then speak to them rudely.

Volunteers on local Liberal campaigns, often amateurs, were confused when they received complaints from supporters, and the party did not counter the tactics or record instances in a systematic way.

Whoever was organizing the calls appears to have been working from lists of Liberal supporters, which could have been compiled through voter-identification calls that all the parties use.

The Conservatives are particularly adept at tracking voters in every riding using a centralized database called CIMS (Constituent Information Management System), with the name and numbers of identified Conservative supporters and opponents alike. Local campaigns are given access to CIMS.

Some Liberals also suspect that someone with access to their lists may have given or sold numbers to the callers.

The deceptive live calls were all made into ridings where Liberals and Conservatives were in tight races, but there were no such calls in some of the ridings that the Conservatives were working hard to take from the Liberals.

High-profile Liberal MPs at the top of Conservatives' target list — such as Ruby Dhalla and Mark Holland — were not targeted.

But from the beginning of the election, campaign staff working for Joe Volpe, in the Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence, were hearing reports from Liberal supporters about strange phone calls.

The Liberals were confused. Jewish voters were being called repeatedly on the Sabbath, which Volpe's veteran team was careful to avoid doing.

Others complained about early morning and late night calls putatively from Volpe's campaign and some supporters asked why the sign they ordered hadn't showed up.

Then, on the afternoon of April 11, a phone in Volpe's own campaign phone bank rang. Volunteer Marsha Sands described the call in an affidavit.

"I picked it up and said hello several times. No voice responded but I could hear voices in the background. I then said, 'Hello, speak please. You've called me.'

"A female voice, soft and young-sounding, said, 'Are you going to vote for Joe Volpe in the up and coming election?' I responded, 'Who are you? Where are you calling from?' several times.

"The caller said, 'The Conservatives.' I said 'What? Who are you?' Response: 'Um, we are conducting a survey.' "

The caller asked if Sands would like a Volpe lawn sign and hung up when Sands pressed her to identify herself. Sands said she could hear muffled coaching and other voices in the background.

Volpe's staff found the number that received the strange call had belonged to a Liberal supporter before it was assigned to the campaign.

Across the country, other campaigns were getting similar reports: fake Liberals calls. The call display often showed a North Dakota telephone number — 701-509-8703 — which Internet message boards show is often used for fraudulent credit card scams.

Tracking these kinds of calls is difficult, even with the subpoena powers that Elections Canada employed to trace fraudulent election day robocalls to RackNine, the Edmonton company that handled voice broadcasting for the Conservative campaign. The company says it didn't know about the robocalls and is co-operating with Elections Canada.

Calls directed through servers abroad can make it impossible to peel back all the layers of the onion to find the source. North Dakota's attorney general warned in 2009 about the use of the state's area code for fraud calls but said it was extremely difficult to track down the culprits.

Volpe and some other campaigns eventually went to the media to complain about what they believed was a dirty tricks campaign.

Conservative spokesman Alykhan Velshi told the CBC at the time that his party wasn't involved.

"The only party with access to the Liberal Party member list is the Liberal Party," he said. "Are you certain they aren't making the calls to their members?"

Liberal campaigns are certain that the calls were not made by their own phone banks, and the call received at Volpe's call bank seems to suggest it wasn't them.

Conservative spokesman Fred Delorey wouldn't say whether the party made any effort at the time to determine whether party workers were involved. He said the party ran a "clean and ethical campaign and would never tolerate such activity." He said the party is calling on Elections Canada to "get to the bottom of this as soon as possible."

Postmedia and the Citizen compiled a database of the reported calls, using Elections Canada records of phone bank spending by individual campaigns to seek a pattern that might show a correlation between a particular company and the calls. There appears to be no such link.

Liberal campaigns believe that, like the robocalls, the live calls were part of a co-ordinated campaign to annoy their supporters and suppress the non-Conservative vote. The Conservatives strongly deny any suggestion that they would do such a thing, and senior Liberals quietly acknowledge that they do not believe Conservative campaign chairman Guy Giorno would approve any such campaign. Giorno did not respond to an email on Friday.

While a single person could easily set up the robocall blasts, making a large number of live calls into multiple ridings would be far more expensive, involve a more co-ordinated effort and access to the kinds of lists that only political parties compile, and require a lot of money. The going rate for live calls for political campaigns is between $30 and $35 an hour.

Elections Canada will not say if it is investigating these nuisance calls. Although several campaigns have complained to the agency about the calls, there have been no reports of investigators interviewing campaigns targeted by the harassing calls.

Most of the reports of harassing calls were in ridings in southern Ontario the Conservatives needed to take from Liberal incumbents or hold onto in order to secure a majority government.

There is no reason to believe that the local Conservative campaigns knew that the harassing calls were being made.

- In Oakville, there were fake Liberal calls, according to Liberal candidate Max Khan's campaign manager. "Sometimes the calls used a voice deliberately mocking of our candidate, with a fake accent," said John McKay. "They were racist."

- In Haldimand-Norfolk, where former Liberal MP Bob Speller was taking on Conservative Diane Finley, fake Liberal calls were waking people up, according to campaign manager Ian Malo.

- In St. Paul's, Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett's campaign had to deal with complaints from Jewish voters who said the campaign was calling them repeatedly on the Sabbath, even though the campaign was careful to never call on Saturday. The calls referred to her as "Doctor Carolyn Bennett," which her own campaign never does.

- In Parkdale-High Park, where Liberal incumbent Gerard Kennedy was in an unsuccessful fight with New Democrat Peggy Nash, Liberals heard reports of strange calls.

"We did receive complaints of our campaign making calls late at night," said campaign worker Jason Easton. "As I was responsible for our call centre relationship in both campaigns, I can guarantee that it was not us making the calls."

That was the only riding to report harassing calls that was not a race between the Conservatives and Liberals.

- In Egmont, Prince Edward Island, where Liberal Guy Gallant was trying to unseat Conservative cabinet minister Gail Shea, the campaign reported fake Liberal calls. Liberal supporter Gilles Painchaud told CBC he received a call that pronounced Guy Gallant as if it was English, which nobody in Prince Edward Island would do.

"They were calling him Guy Gallant, it took a while for it to register," Painchaud told CBC. "Then once I clued into what they were saying . . . they said, 'Do you have intention to vote Guy Gallant?' and I said, 'Well that's really my own doing.' "

- In Saint Boniface, Man., Liberal candidate Raymond Simard realized something was happening in mid-April when the volunteers working on his phone bank started to get complaints.

Simard was trying to unseat Conservative Shelly Glover.

"I was sitting in my office and our volunteers were all sitting very close to my office," he said. "A couple times I could hear some of our volunteers saying, 'No. It can't be our volunteers. We're trained and we're not rude to people.'

"The next day, I was knocking on doors, walking through some of our strong buildings, and some of our people at the doors were saying, 'What are you doing here? You guys just called at seven this morning.' So obviously it was happening."

- In Niagara Falls, Ont., Liberal candidate Bev Hodgson, who was trying to win the seat from Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, was victimized, according to Craig Brockwell, her campaign manager.

"We had been receiving complaints in the campaign headquarters that had said, 'We don't need you calling us back anymore. We're not going to vote for your candidate because of the call received last night.' They would have been after nine o'clock. They would have been rude. Identifying themselves as Bev Hodgson campaign workers. And they would escalate the conversation and be somehow rude or abrupt, anything to agitate the voter."

- In Cambridge, Ont., where Liberal Bryan May was trying to unseat Conservative Gary Goodyear, supporters received harassing calls and the Liberal switchboard was jammed by a fax machine repeatedly dialing in.

- In London North Centre, in Ontario, toward the end of the campaign, Liberal MP Glen Pearson started to get a frosty reception at some doors, with voters telling him they were upset because live callers were telling them he spends six months of every year in Africa.

"It was primarily the fact that I had spent a lot of time in Africa," he said. "It's one week a year. And it's in January, when the House isn't even sitting."

Pearson believed the calls were timed so that he didn't have time to respond to the unfair and untrue charges. Pearson has three Sudanese children and visits Africa annually with them.

He lost his race to Conservative Susan Truppe by 1,665 votes. He says he is glad he lost, because he doesn't believe he was able to make a difference as a politician, but he doesn't like the way it happened.

"I'm glad I'm out of this, but I am disturbed that people ended up winning the elections through the demise of democracy," he said.

The Conservatives are disavowing any involvement in the pre-recorded robocalls made through an Edmonton voice-broadcasting company with Tory ties and, through leaks to other media organizations, are suggesting that a campaign worker or independent private contractor was responsible for those calls.

Various media reported on Friday that Michael Sona, a campaign worker in Guelph, resigned his job working for Conservative MP Eve Adams. Sona made headlines when he tried to shut down a special university ballot during the campaign.

Opposition MPs have accused the Conservatives of trying to blame a bigger problem on a junior staffer by throwing Sona "under the bus" — making him a scapegoat. Postmedia News has repeatedly tried to contact Sona for comment, without success.

The Conservatives used several calling companies during the campaign to make legitimate voter identification calls using live operators. Responsive Marketing Group worked on 92 Conservative campaigns across the country, while Campaign Research was hired by 39, mostly in Ontario.

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